Highlights
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Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then, the stupidity of the contemporary corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.
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In those departments, beloved by the CEOs, a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don’t comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the profit that can be made out of them-or occasionally, for the top executives, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit. And not only profit, but growth. If there are stockholders, their holdings must increase yearly, daily, hourly. The AP article ascribed “listless” or “flat” book sales to the limited opportunity for expansion. But until the corporate takeovers, publishers did not expect expansion; they were quite happy if their supply and demand ran parallel, if their books sold steadily, “flatly.” How can you make book sales endlessly, like the American waistline? corn. When you’ve grown enough corn to fill every reasonable demand Michael Pollan explains in The Omnivore’s Dilemma how you do it with you create unreasonable demands-artificial needs. So, having induced the government to declare corn-fed beef to be the standard, you feed corn to cattle, who cannot digest corn, tormenting and poisoning them And you use the fats and sweets of corn by-products to make an endless array of soft drinks and fast foods, addicting people to a fattening yet inadequate diet in the And process. you can’t stop these processes, because if you did profits might become “listless,” even “flat”
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And the internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from web surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven’t done it yet. 71
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Besides, readers aren’t viewers; they recognize their pleasure as different TV goes on, and on, and on, and all from that of being entertained. Once you’ve pressed the on button, the have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness-not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it-everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are: reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.
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For most of human history, most people couldn’t read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless, it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue. The ability to maintain and understand commercial records, the ability to communicate across distance and in code, the ability to keep the word of God to yourself and transmit it only at your own will and in your own time-these are formidable means of control over others and aggrandizement of self. Every literate society began with literacy as a constitutive prerogative of the (male) ruling class
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The loyal fans bought Death at One O’Clock . yet all of a sudden they won’t buy Death at and Death at Two O’Clock… as Eleven O’Clock even though it follows exactly the same surefire formula all the others. The readers got bored. What is a good growth-capitalist publisher to do? Where can he be safe? He can find some safety in exploiting the social function of literature.